The processing of a silver halide color light-sensitive material is comprised basically of two processes; i.e., color developing and desilvering processes. The desilvering process is comprised of bleaching and fixing processes or of a bleach-fix process. Besides, additional processes such as rinsing, stabilization, and the like processes are used.
In recent years, these developing processes have been generally carried out either continuously (running processing) or intermittently in automatic processors by photofinishers.
There is an important problem in the running processing or intermittent processing by use of such automatic processors. It is the increase in the mixing-in and accumulation of different processing liquid components. This becomes conspicuous when the processing liquid's replenishing amount becomes reduced to lower the degree of renewing the tank liquid with a replenisher, and it becomes more conspicuous when combined with the prolongation of the using term of the liquid. The above-mentioned `mixing-in of a different processing solution` is caused by carrying into the developer solution, immediately after the development, of the subsequent processing solution's component (so-called `back contamination`) by the splash, transport leader, or film hanger inside an automatic processor. Of these mixing-in components, the thiosulfate ion as a fixer accelerates the developement. That is, this problem strongly occurs particularly when a photographic material is bleach-fixed directly after being color-developed. Especially, the shoulder portion of a photographic characteristic curve is enhanced, thus resulting in the formation of a significantly high-contrast image. And the increase in the mixing-in of a metallic salt as a fixing agent, particularly a ferric salt, accelerates the decomposition of hydroxylamine as a preservative to thereby produce ammonia ions. The production of the ammonia ion also accelerates physical development just as the thiosulfate ion does, so that is is disadvantageous in respect of forming a high-contrast image.
As for the prior art for the improvement on the variation of photographic characteristics due to the mixing-in of a different processing liquid's component, as far as we know, there have been no substantially improved examples in light-sensitive materials. On the other hand, it is the status quo that there exist almost no techniques for improving processing solutions to thereby improve the above variation of photographic characteristics. Although there are only a few techniques for chelating the heavy metallic ion slightly present in a bleach-fix bath as described in, e.g., U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,839,045, 3,746,544, 4,264,716, and the like, the improving extent by these techniques is small and still not satisfactory.